B2B Demand Generation: chapter IP Tracking

DynamicWeb

Turn anonymous web visitors into qualified leads and know exactly what your hot prospects are doing on your website. IP tracking is a fantastic solution for any B2B organization! Even with business shifted to work-from-home, IP tracking continues to have a place in the marketing technology stack supporting sales in many B2B businesses and B2B Ecommerce business environments. 

In this post I will be covering the possibilities that IP tracking can offer today to any B2B business, ranging from the sales to marketing implications and how a solution like this can have a profound impact on business and ecommerce result.  

An often-heard argument is that you might know the company who visited your website, but not the person who visited. The answer to that one is, which department in that company would usually purchase your offering? Usually it comes down to a handful of people.  

But one swallow does not make a summer… two or more however… As a colleague of mine often says, your potential customers are not visiting your website to find a sudoku puzzle (thanks Harry), their visit probably has a purpose and you can choose to act upon it. Where most solutions by now are able to recognize not only the company visiting, but also if it’s one person, or several.  

The beauty of this marketing technology (martech) is that it is extremely easy to get started with, in most cases these SAAS solutions are on an affordable month to month bases. Which will fit great in any marketing mix and marketing strategy as it is so easy to get started with. The only thing you need is a website integration and a credit card + maybe one hour of your time on discovering how the solution works. 

Martech IP Tracking Solutions 

There are multiple solutions out there that offer tracking with IP addresses, differing mostly in price and the level to recognize the company visiting your website. Most of these solutions allow a ‘recognition’ rate of up to say 75% of your visitors – this does have a lot of variables related to location and industry you are in.  

You can start very affordable with something like Leadberry, but I would recommend Leadfeeder over them. Their user interface (UI) and ability to recognize companies is just better and they have a good quality price balance.  

Another strong solution is Albacross, next to a good solution on IP tracking they are able to combine it with a personalization API which allows you to personalize your website based on available data via Google Optimize. Just imagine that you recognize the company’s industry and have a different, industry matching, message shown on your homepage. AND that you can have this setup in a matter of hours, of which the most time goes into creating the personalized message. In addition, they also have a neat feature allowing to run display advertising in a targeted manner to (specific) web visitors, all integrated into their SAAS solution.  

Albacross – lead overview list 

And then there is one more I would like to mention: Lead Forensics. Very strong solution as well, high ability to recognize companies hitting your website. And they also offer a similar IP based personalization engine via their own ‘what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG)’ editor that includes a simple to use analytics solution so you can measure the impact of applied personalization. My experience is that performance can go up by 20-30%; more time on site, more page visits, more conversions, etc.  
 

Lead Forensics – lead overview list 

IP Based Personalization 

Already touched on the topic, the power of IP Based Personalization has been under pressure ever since working from home took to the next level. A certain Digital Experience Platform leader even shared that this form of personalization is dead. However, I believe that IP Based Personalization can be a great start! Capturing the attention of the new web visitor, able to hold and trigger their interest in the short first seconds where you can make a difference. The ability to show messaging that is close to their industry will result in an increase of their attention span with more page visits, longer time on site, return visits and higher conversion rates as a result.  

Example DynamicWeb – Personalisation based on IP available information 

Martech Integration 

A marketing technology solution like this, depending on the size of your marketing and sales force, can very well stand by itself and have a real impact on the (sales) performance of your business. Additional benefits can be achieved if you are able to integrate this with other solutions like Microsoft Dynamics 365, your Linkedin environment for social selling, your email marketing automation, and your ad platforms for retargeting specific companies. 

Solutions like this can also show you that there are multiple visits from different people, having this data go straight into your CRM allows you to apply engagement value scoring (a variant of lead scoring) and contextual insights. Our sales leader VP of Sales, Brede, is an advocate to have this information in the CRM system so that independent of knowing who visited the website, we gather each visit, which pages were visited and more, straight into the account. This helps the sales owner to gather a full 360 view on what is going on related to this account, for new prospects, open opportunities, current customers and DynamicWeb partners. 

Imagine how these available insights will help us support the customer in a better way, driving better customer experience – in B2B and B2C!  

From a marketing perspective this allows us to offer a better experience by applying this additional information in many ways; pushing contacts based on their, and their account, behavior into the right email marketing automation nurture flow, personalize the frontpage next time they visit this page (even within the same session) and/or personalize call to action items on our product pages. The possibilities are endless.  

One tip, have a data and experience strategy and start small – but start! 

Reporting and activity based notifications 

Unrelated to if all this data flows into your CRM or not, reporting on what happens on the website can be a very powerful solution for sales involved. There are many ways in how this setup would benefit you and your organization. Do you use your CRM to fire these report notifications or do you make use of what the solution offers, dealer’s choice – but most of these IP tracking solutions have easy to use reporting and notification processes, going through them might be the quickest and easiest way. 

High-level there are three reporting ways to look at first: 

• Certain page visited 
• Hitting a threshold of activities 
• Visit from company x 

Certain page visited – Not all pages are of equal value, if they visit your job vacancy pages would you, from a sales perspective, really care? But what if they visit your demo and/or price page but don’t convert there? I bet you would like to know who visit your pricing page! 

Hitting a threshold of activities – If the visiting company visits six of your product pages and checks a customer case study page or two that probably shows they are investigating a solution or at least they have a pain to resolve. If you see more than one person visiting in a matter of days and they both visit multiple (non-marketing) pages this would be a dead giveaway something is going on at that account.  

Visit from company x – depending on the amount of companies visiting it might be hard to keep track of all, and some of these solutions allow you to integrate with your CRM or upload a ‘monitored account’ list. Meaning that a company matching that list will hit your site it will fire a notification to the right sales manager. A bit more work to set this up, but it gets a lot of value from the sales force when this is possible.  

Conclusion 

IP tracking, even in the shift towards working-from-home trend, is still a viable, easily available and achievable tool in the pocket of marketing & sales and should be part of most B2B marketing technology stacks in 2020.  

Get the contextual 360 view of your potential & existing customer and start offering a better customer experience to them today.